In my recent piece for The Free Press, I wrote about Nate, a paradigmatic tenth grader whose parents, and eventually his school, pushed me to recommend extended time on tests, even when I was clear I didn’t think he needed the accommodation. I’m so grateful that The Free Press ran the essay, and it seems like this is an issue that is meaningful to a lot of readers.
Some of the comments, however, questioned why I sounded so critical of private schools specifically. I get it: Much ink has been spilled about wealthy public school families securing academic accommodations for their kids in order to give them a leg up, so this is clearly not just a private school issue. But I do believe Nate’s story exemplifies a widespread and underreported problem in how testing accommodations are granted at private schools, which leads to real inequities that go far beyond what prior conversations have covered.
To explain more thoroughly, I thought I’d write a follow-up post to provide some context here: how testing accommodations work in public schools, and what changes when a private school is the one granting them.
How the System is Supposed to Work
To understand what’s going wrong, it helps to understand how testing accommodations are generally granted at public schools, which serve the majority of American students, including a disproportionate share of students with disabilities and with limited financial resources.
Public schools are required by federal law to provide every student with a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive possible environment. That requirement includes providing appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities.
Two federal laws govern this process. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) covers students whose disabilities require specialized instruction and related services. To qualify, a student must fall under one of thirteen defined disability categories, the disability must adversely affect educational performance, and the student must need special education services to access their education.
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act casts a broader net, covering any student with a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits participation in a major life activity. In the case of testing accommodations, we can reasonably assume that activity is school.
The problem is both laws are somewhat ambiguous. In IDEA, thresholds for what counts as a “disability,” an “adverse effect,” and a “need” aren’t clearly defined. Likewise, in Section 504, what “substantially limits participation” can be interpreted subjectively.
Since these legal standards are a bit slippery, schools use several methods to determine whether a student qualifies for a disability designation. The three most common are the discrepancy model, the Patterns of Strengths and Weaknesses approach, and Response to Intervention.
The discrepancy model—historically the most common—looks for a significant gap between a student’s IQ and their academic skills. The idea is that a student who is clearly intellectually capable but performing below expectations may have an underlying disorder. The problem, however, is that the underlying assumption—that a gap between IQ and achievement signals a learning disability—has been largely discredited by subsequent research. Instead, kids across the IQ spectrum—low, average, and high IQ—can be either strong or weak learners. And, alarmingly, since IQ tests are culturally biased, this model tends to underidentify students from certain marginalized groups who have artificially low IQs, and they fail to be linked to appropriate services.
In contrast, the Patterns of Strengths and Weaknesses approach looks at the overall profile of a student’s cognitive and academic skills, identifying relative strengths and weaknesses that are consistent with particular learning disabilities. This is where comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations tend to play the largest role, as they provide detailed data on the specific cognitive processes underlying a student’s academic performance. However, cognitive strengths and weaknesses are transdiagnostic and nonspecific, so this model has not borne out as a reliable way of identifying kids with disabilities in school.
Finally, Response to Intervention, or RTI, takes a different approach altogether, providing increasingly intensive tiers of instructional support to all struggling students and monitoring their progress. Students who don’t respond adequately to evidence-based intervention at multiple tiers may then be identified for special education evaluation and support. RTI is generally considered more proactive and reliable than the other models, though it requires schools to have robust, well-implemented tiered support systems, and not all do.
Different states permit different combinations of these methods, and school districts vary considerably in how rigorously they implement them. This variability means that wealthy districts with more resources tend to identify more students and provide more services, and wealthy parents are more likely to have the knowledge and advocacy skills to navigate the process effectively. None of this is a secret. It has been documented and discussed extensively.
But all this discourse is failing to acknowledge that all of that variability, all of that slipperiness, still exists within a system with guardrails: the documentation, notification, and due process requirements I described in The Free Press. Private schools have none of them.
A Different World
Private schools that do not receive federal funding are not subject to IDEA or Section 504. They have no legal obligation to identify students with disabilities, no requirement to provide a free appropriate education, and no mandate to offer any particular accommodations to any particular student. Many private schools–to their credit–are honest about this: They do not have the resources or expertise to educate students who need special education services, and those students should look elsewhere.
But the flip side of having no legal obligations is having no legal constraints. Private schools can modify testing conditions whenever and however they want, for any student, for any reason. No disability designation is required. They can give extra time to everyone, or to no one, or to whichever students they think might benefit.
What this looks like in practice varies enormously. Some private schools have adopted policies that mirror the standards of Section 504, requiring documentation of a disability before granting accommodations. A notable number do not. Many private schools in and around New York City, where I practice, operate more or less like Nate’s school: They will grant extended time based on a recommendation from a private neuropsychologist, selected and paid for by the family.
When we think about these policies, it’s worth considering what neuropsychological evaluations are and aren’t good at.
A comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation can be an extraordinarily useful clinical tool. It can provide detailed data on a student’s cognitive and academic functioning across many domains. It can provide a rich, integrated picture of a student’s abilities. It can compare a student’s functioning to that of a large sample of same-aged peers and, in doing so, it can distinguish between garden variety difficulties and genuine deficits, between age-appropriate struggles and disorders.
What neuropsychological evaluations are not particularly good at—and what they are not designed to do—is function as gatekeepers for disability accommodations. Neuropsychologists are clinicians, not school administrators or lawyers. Their job is to understand a student’s functioning and recommend whatever treatment plan might help that student succeed. And extra time on tests is genuinely helpful for most students, not just students with disabilities. When kids sit down to take a test, they are being asked to demonstrate mastery of recently learned material that has not yet become automatic. Working through problems takes time and effort. Time pressure adds stress, and stress degrades performance. Allow more time, and most kids do better.
As I noted in The Free Press, it’s rare to find a neuropsychologist who doesn’t recommend extra time. That’s not because most of our patients have disabilities, but because most of our patients are students, and students tend to benefit from more time. But when private schools interpret our recommendations as determinations, many, many students without disabilities end up receiving what most of the world considers disability accommodations.
That’s how we end up with numbers like the ones I cited from the United Kingdom, where students at private schools receive testing accommodations at rates roughly 50% higher than their state school peers. We don’t collect comparable data here in the United States because private schools aren’t required to report it, but there is no reason to believe what is happening in American schools is any different.
The Stakes
From here, inequities compound. High-stakes tests—like the SAT and ACT—grant testing accommodations largely on the basis of documented school history. A student who has been receiving extended time throughout grade school has the track record to support that accommodation on standardized tests. A student who has not does not.
So as students approach the most consequential academic tests of their educational careers, students from wealthy private schools—who, on average, arrive at college admissions with significant advantages in terms of resources and preparation—are also disproportionately taking high-stakes tests under more favorable testing conditions. Students from public schools, who had to clear a much higher bar to receive any accommodation at all, are not.
Where the Blame Actually Belongs
In The Free Press, I argued that, rather than blaming parents, we should ask why private schools set up a system that is so easy to game in the first place. Of course, when a system presents an available loophole, parents who are paying attention and have the resources will pursue it. It’s not admirable, exactly, but it is human and natural and predictable.
Private schools have no legal obligation to follow the frameworks that govern public schools, but they do have an ethical one. If private schools are genuinely committed to the values of fairness and integrity that appear in virtually every one of their mission statements, this is a place to demonstrate it. They should adopt the same standards for granting testing accommodations that govern public schools, with documented disabilities, clear policies, and consistent procedures.
Accommodations are a civil rights protection, designed to ensure that students with disabilities do not face discrimination. As I wrote in The Free Press, when they become something you can purchase, the students who lose are the ones who were never in a position to buy them in the first place.
Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive of my book launch! I hope you all enjoy Actually, You’re Fine!
This is a direct link to the Nikole Hannah-Jones article. If you can afford to get the tests for extended time, should you do it? Even if you think it's not morally right, do you hold your child back from the accommodations that so many other kids are getting? What is the point of a standardized test if it's not standard?
I don’t subscribe to the Free Press and so couldn’t read your whole article. This is really helpful guidance for educators and mentors. Is there another way I can access the original article?